The country is more thoroughly sunken in the water than any other inhabited part of the globe. It seemed to me that the inhabitants might have been called Finlanders, because they ought to be amphibious. But the name comes from the ancient _fen_, or fennen, which is also an English word for bog or morass. The Laplanders were the original settlers on the southern shore of the Baltic, but they have retired to more northern regions still. The interior of the country is almost filled with lakes, irregularly shaped, and making travelling by land exceedingly tedious, as one must wind his way far around these arms and branches. There is one lake, Saima, two hundred miles wide, in which there are a _thousand_ and more of islands. The largest is called Amasara, or mother-island; on this island there are _seventy-seven_ lakes, and in these lakes _fifty_ islands. This great lake is connected with Lake Ladoga, in Russia, and, by a canal here at Wyborg, with the Gulf of Finland. Now it will pay you to take a map, and, with this description, see what a stretch of water communication extends through Finland into Russia. If you were to go by this canal to Lake Saima, and so to Lake Ladoga, you would not see much of the people, but you would find it easier and pleasanter getting through than to take the only other conveyance, that of the drosky. This is a low sulky, in which only one person can sit, though a driver, if you must have one, manages to get a seat by the horse’s heels. The horses are small, nervous, and wiry, and have learned from colthood to go on the jump all the time, up hill and down hill, and on a level. Ladies who come travelling here must and do adapt themselves to this unsocial mode of travel, and ride all day alone, or with the company of a ragged boy, who speaks no word the traveller understands, and spends his time in walloping the beast, to quicken his rapid canter. Between the lonely post-houses it is rare to meet a human being, or to pass a habitation; but the solemn pine-trees make the gloom more gloomy, and huge boulder stones rise, like towers of giant builders waiting for their masters to return. Some of them have been utilized by the progress of art and science. It was one of these great boulders that was cut into the splendid Alexander column we saw in St. Petersburg, the largest monolith in the world. The enginery required to move it from its place, where, perhaps, the deluge left it, and transport it to the heart of a distant city, fairly rivals the skill of the Egyptian pyramid builders, or the men who set Pompey’s Pillar on its base.